Monthly Archives: August 2009

Quentin Tarantino’s latest movie, Inglourious Basterds, makes the Sharon Tate murders look like a baby shower. At least Manson’s vision was more articulate and more inspired (The White Album), whereas Tarantino’s massacre is just a Leonesque like retribution that lacks catharsis with a lame rehashed soundtrack.

While Hebrew law in the Old Testament states, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” I’m pretty sure God didn’t have an overgrown self proclaimed provocateur and teenage movie geek in mind to show them the promise land while scalping Nazi’s. Given that Tarantino is part Cherokee I wonder if an Indian made a Western revisionist movie about some tribe assassinating Lincoln in a balcony box theater and burning down the White House (given the cruel treatment and injustice they suffered from all our robbing, raping, and pillaging) that it would be widely celebrated in Iraq and Afghanistan…and parts of Pakistan…basically the whole Muslim culture including Cat Stevens. Anyway, Americans have a word for that and that’s the discovery of the New World. Jews call it the Holocaust, Manson calls it Helter Skelter and Tarantino calls it Inglourious Basterds. Ghandi warns, “An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind”…something clearly Tarantino and cohorts do not adhere to. But neither did Charlie’s.

Though I must admit the most villainous character of the Nazis, The “Jew Hunter,” Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) was quite affective in making Major Strasser from Casablanca look as harmless as the Crocodile Hunter (maybe it’s all that milk). I also enjoyed Brad Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine’s Southern inflection of the way he pronounced “Nazi.” I wonder if Born again Christian Tex Watson had the same dialect when selling pigs wigs. The film debut of Melanie Laurent, who plays the sole surviving family member that fled from Col. Landa’s clutches, is subjected to the worst trivial getting dressed to kill montage accompanied with Bowie’s Cat People (Putting Out Fire) (whoa, irony!) but otherwise is very good as an Anne Frank type gone postal. While the rest of the Basterds rumor a threat with nicknames such as “Bear Jew” and “Little Man” none are as intimidating as the posing sweet Sexy Sadie, Squeaky, Clem, LuLu, and JC.

I am curious to know what drugs Tarantino used vs. this hippie gang bang. With the script’s inconsistent intro flashbacks, repetitious dialogue and slow motion sequences adding minutes lasting hours I wonder if it was just an Adderall overdose.

“You know, it’s just that people like this, you know, they get all they want so they really don’t understand, you know, about a life like Frank’s. I mean, when you’ve loved and lost the way Frank has, then you, you know what life’s about.” – Tommy Pischedda

Like Davis Guggenheim’s past doc, An Inconvenient Truth, It Might Get Loud is also just another pointless exercise in star-fucking as he brings three Rock “Icons,” Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White center stage to reminisce on some comfy couches about their love affair with the guitar and themselves.

While visiting his delta blues roots, music nerd Jack White reveals how much of a poser he and his fans are (including his son, Jack Jr., who goes to the same tailor) as he strums ’til his fingers bleed copying every past blind pickin’ blues man. Let’s just hope Little Jack turns out to be more haughty and saucy.

“Take a load off Fanny…”

The Edge on the other hand likes to keep an assortment of pedals at his feet to cover up his single chord strumming. I can see why he wept after seeing This is Spinal Tap – I guess he likes to hear his music in Dubly too. The only explanation for this casting was in hopes for a Bono cameo, which thank God did not surface.

“The sustain listen to it’.”

“I don’t hear anything…”

“Well you would though, if it were playing.”

Jimmy Page is the one with the most rock cred, showing more talent when rocking out on his air guitar to a Dick Dale’s Rumble vinyl, and is the most interesting with filler stock footage from the 1960s to justify some sort of documentation.

“I know how to get there, all I’ve got to do is keep playing.” – Jimmy Page

As for the anti-climactic jam session this supergroup ends up striking the wrong chord as they cover The Band’s The Weight.“This tasteless cover is a good indication of the lack of musical invention within. The musical growth of this band cannot even be charted. They are treading water in a sea of retarded sexuality and bad poetry.” Or are we just nitpicking?

Producer Peter Jackson, the new James Cameron’s of state of the art sci-fi movies and special effects, is perhaps the biggest draw to District 9. That and the fact that I could not walk a block without being bombarded with ads leaving me wondering, “What’s with that huge fucking UFO?” I mean, I sure as shit never heard of Director Neill Blomkamp.

Well as it turns out it just ran out of gas. But I guess not completely, for it still had the fuel to remain hovering over Johannesburg for almost three fucking decades without falling to the ground. The movie opens with the Aliens (or Prawns as they’re called due to their aversion to shellfish) already established in their own district within the city and as I would surmise leaving Districts 8 and 10 none too pleased as their neighbors are not only scavengers and slobs but like to deal in the dangerous contraband of overpriced catfood, Nigerian Gangstas, and fornicating with local prostitutes. So to clean up this fishy ongoing twenty eight year mess up, they hire Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) who works for some kind of governmental authorized munitions company that secretly is just interested in activating the alien weaponry by extracting their DNA more so than relocating the one million plus aliens including Christopher Johnson and his precocious son Christopher Johnson Jr. (?) (probably the worst fucking names for an alien in the history of movies since Alien or The Thing!), whom Wikus comes so intimately in contact with to the point where he is falsely accused of doing it doggie style with Johnson so as to smear his credibility. Thank God Peter Jackson learned his lesson from Kong and didn’t cast Jack Black because Sharlto is quite good and just campy enough that he pulls off this implausible yet original tale whereas Jack Black would readily be believed to be an alien ass fucker. Blomkamp also establishes early on the sense of urgency and immediacy by his hand held documentary style and by incorporating mock TV and black and white surveillance camera footage giving the overall film an original approach to the Sci-Fi genre.

However despite this fresh take on alien visitors I cannot fully accept the attempt to correlate Apartheid and xenophobia as these Jumbo Shrimp have no interest in integrating or sitting in the front of the bus thereby nullifying the notion of a District 9 eviction.

Still the real heart and humanity of the story remains in the relationship of Christopher Johnson (the only Prawn who has a chemistry set and higher intelligence) and his lovable Son whom both just yearn to phone home.

First time writer-director Sophie Barthes opens Cold Souls with a quote from French philosopher Rene Decartes:

“The soul has it’s principal seat in the small gland located in the middle of the brain.”

But I found my soul struggling to stay awake as the movie is billed “a soul searching comedy” and is apparently still searching. The movie centers around NY actor Paul Giamatti (Paul Giamatti) who while struggling with his role in a Chekov play comes across an article in The New Yorker about a storage facility for souls. Not knowing what else to blame for his shortcomings he further ventures to the storage facility (coincidentally located on Roosevelt Island substituting for Blackwell’s Lunatic Asylum) and buys into soul extraction. While the script and sets are copied and all too familiar, the only original and refreshing part of this scene is Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn) who is very convincing and reassuring when Giamatti finds out that his heavy soul is just a chickpea – which happens to be the best prop. (I hope my soul is a vinyl copy of side 1 of Zeppelin 4.)

Apparently Giamatti has no fear of being typecast and should maybe next play all the characters in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author to further explore his persona and narcissism. But the real twist to this so-called metaphysical comedy is of course when Giamatti wants his soul back and finds it’s been smuggled to Russia’s black market where he then has to go and bargain with soap opera loving mobsters? and mules all the while wearing an ushanka.

Sophie’s quest for peace of mind is ultimately a shitty handheld study on Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It would of been spot on if when they extracted Giamatti’s soul Jim Carrey pops out with John Malkovich’s voice box.